On Martin Luther King Day, let’s really go out on a limb and declare all racial discrimination is bad. It doesn’t take a great leap of courage to say such a thing. There may be a million cultural prejudices involved with assessing the merits of the world’s diverse peoples and populations, but skin tone or eye shape shouldn’t be one of them.

To the left, however, discrimination by race is very much acceptable under certain circumstances -- as long as they’re the ones doing the judging.

If you’re a member of certain minority groups and happen to teach at an academic institution, for example, you can say pretty much whatever you want without fear of administrative censure or social repercussions. Recently it came to light that a white student was discriminated against by a Native American professor at a state university in California, and the case is bringing up all sorts of questions about proper belief systems in our all-too-confused twenty-first century society.

“The results of the investigation were laid out in a confidential 51-page report obtained by the Daily Aztec, San Diego State University’s independent student newspaper. It details multiple conversations and meetings between the lecturer and then-student Crystal Sudano.

“Sudano, who is white, filed four complaints against her professor, Oscar ‘Ozzie’ Monge, who is Chicano and Native American.”

To synopsize the rest of the sad tale, Monge is well-known at SDSU for his opposition to the school’s having used “Aztecs” as its mascot, which he claims equates to “cultural appropriation”. Cooley added, “The investigation found that Monge sent at least 15 offensive Facebook messages to Sudano, including one that threatened her grade after she challenged his position on the Aztec mascot.”

In other words, Sudano, who was born white, expressed an opinion contrary to the prevailing trend of leftist political thought control and was punished for it. Monge (the professor), who happens to be non-white, retaliated with bullying messages via social media, calling her a racist and threatened to take out his intolerance by giving her a bad grade. Such is the power college teachers possess to regulate the thinking patterns of students. Unfortunately such behavior isn’t likely restricted to this one little incident; I’m guessing this type of thing happens everywhere.

Anyone who dares to express a conservative or traditional belief can expect rebuke from leftists. It’s what they do best. Sudano should feel fortunate it didn’t come in the form of a urine bomb at her front door or mace in the face.

Ever since Donald Trump assumed the presidency much has been written concerning the academic left’s intolerance for views conflicting with their notions of Trump’s competency, sanity, policies or personnel choices, but here’s a concrete circumstance where there was actual racial discrimination by a person of-color against a non-minority who challenged his politically correct worldview.

And because the professor’s accusations were made through the wide open lens of social media, no doubt many other people were witnesses to the bullying behavior. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out when a non-white person labels a white person as a racist it’s a serious charge in today’s America, mostly due to the greater culture’s presumption that the non-white person is always right about who’s a racist and who’s not -- and the white person must therefore indeed be prejudiced and subject to conviction.

The left’s basic argument goes a little like this: because a white person is raised in an environment where they experience no “real” discrimination they are therefore incapable of recognizing when actual racism takes place. These people reason that because of a comparative lack of melanin in a white person’s skin that others treat them superior to a similarly situated member of a minority group.

Toss aside the fact that affirmative action programs have systematically (and legally) discriminated against Asians and white applicants for decades when it comes to public hiring or admissions to colleges and universities.

Such legally sanctioned race-based discrimination is not only “acceptable” but desirable to the left as payback for the historic existence of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws that forced racial minorities to endure mistreatment and hardship a half century (or more) ago. Those systematic wrongs have since been righted in the statute books yet the view persists that racism is real and white people still harbor animosities towards minority groups simply because of their outward appearances.

That may be true for torch bearing idiots in random places but the 99.999999% of well-adjusted non-racist Caucasian people don’t deserve the hassle.

The fact that a professor of Native American ancestry feels so free to express his opinions of what constitutes racism is an indication that some forms of discrimination are tolerated and the system now works to protect the non-white discriminators from facing repercussions for their oppression. How fair is that?

The problem isn’t confined to one case in California either. Neil Dwyer of Red Alert Politics reported in the Washington Examiner, “While most of the northern United States is embroiled in bitter cold and snowy conditions, one of the more controversial members of the House of Representatives has turned up the heat on his version of the progressive agenda. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., posed for a selfie at a bookstore with The Anti-Fascist Handbook, billed as a relatively new historical look at anti-fascism movements past and present.

“Looking at reviews of the book, all the leading scholarly reviewers openly praise it, especially in the wake of President Trump’s remarks after the Charlottesville, Va., clash between neo-Nazis, Antifa, and others.

“Young America’s Foundation, however, has strongly condemned the Minnesota Democrat for taking a selfie with such a book, which the group calls an ‘inexplicable embrace of violent Antifa tactics.’ YAF works in close concert with conservative college students to spread awareness of their shared values across campuses and also sponsors leading conservative speakers like Ben Shapiro — who almost had his Berkeley lecture canceled due to Antifa rioting.”

It’s a shame conservative students have to feel defensive about their pro-liberty conservative views. To voice them in public could get someone in trouble with the Antifa crowd Ellison feels so strongly about.

Needless to say Ellison’s “selfie” was disseminated through the left’s best friend, social media. Apparently because Ellison is black (and Muslim) he feels it’s okay to champion an organization that represents racial violence. The anarchist members of “Antifa” wear black hoods which mask their identities -- a direct violation of unmasking laws originally passed to prevent KKK terrorists from committing crimes and getting away with them simply because witnesses couldn’t see their faces to identify them.

Sadly, Ellison is characteristic of the hard leftist turn of today’s Democrat Party, a socialist sympathizer in the Bernie Sanders mold and one of President Trump’s loudest and most uninhibited critics. To their credit, a number of Democrats have condemned Antifa’s violent tactics -- but Ellison isn’t one of them. Again, racial discrimination is acceptable as long as it’s espoused by someone who isn’t white.

People like Ellison use the race issue to accomplish what they otherwise couldn’t through traditional means like the ballot box or simple persuasion to influence public opinion. The Democrat party has moved so far left it’s taken to condoning obvious lawbreaking – like illegal immigration – simply because most “undocumented” persons are non-white.

Perhaps the left’s biggest beef with Trump is for his principled and oft-stated views on building the border wall, ending chain migration and deporting criminal illegal aliens. Democrats object to these realistic and popularly supported positions mostly on racial grounds, accusing Trump and other conservatives who stand behind law enforcement as being defenders of white supremacists who are solely intent on preventing more brown people from entering the country.

Never mind the fact Trump has time and again condemned white hate groups. The left has even called Trump anti-Semitic despite his consistent robust support of Israel and the fact his daughter and grandchildren are Jewish.

The “racist” label stuck to Trump in large part because of falsehoods that are quickly circulated and perpetuated through social media. The establishment news media has certainly been no friend to Trump but as demonstrated above (in both the Ellison and SDSU cases), social media is the preferred means of leftists to exercise their mind intimidation.

The harm social media inflicts is no longer a dirty little secret, too. Kalev Leetaru wrote at Real Clear Politics, “Is Facebook tearing us apart as a society? Are digital filter bubbles and addictive misinformation truly at the root of the partisan divides splitting our communities? Or are we simply at an inflection point in society, in which income inequality, globalization, disappearing jobs, housing, food, health care, education and myriad other social issues are dividing us into a nation of haves and have-nots? Lest we forget, we had a Civil War without benefit of Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps social media offers us a new lens to observe all of this.

“Perhaps the cacophony of voices that have always argued or agreed are now visible to our computer algorithms and statistical visualizations, which make it seem that today’s woes are the result of Silicon Valley rather than Washington. After all, social media is the perfect scapegoat for a world we don’t understand: It’s easier to blame an algorithm than affairs of state, simpler to fix computer code than civilization itself.”

Leetaru’s article is long but very thought provoking. It discusses how Facebook is dividing American culture by limiting exposure to the types of news we see rather than presenting a variety of stories like in the old newspaper days. The social media news is also unverified and spreads like wildfire regardless of truth or a factual basis.

Facebook alone isn’t the problem but there’s little doubt the social media giants have changed the way people receive and digest information. Rumors spread faster and it’s increasingly difficult to fact check everything that pops up on the screen. The establishment media doesn’t help things.

The left has weaponized racism to destroy what remains of traditional American culture and institutions such as the church and family. Social media is the liberals’ preferred method for spreading propaganda, a strategy that’s proved very effective for furthering their sinister aims.